We founded American Compass in 2020 with a mission to restore an economic consensus that emphasizes the importance of family, community, and industry to the nation’s liberty and prosperity. A blind faith in markets had come to dominate right-of-center economic thinking, at great cost to conservatism’s political prospects and the common good. This market fundamentalism left policymakers and pundits unable or unwilling even to admit the serious challenges that Americans were facing, let alone craft a responsive agenda. Tax cuts, deregulation, and free trade were the only items on the menu; cheap labor and rising corporate profits were the goals. Government’s only task was to get out of the way, and anyone who suggested otherwise was, as former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley put it, taking “the slow path to socialism.”
The legacy institutions of establishment conservatism—think tanks, editorial pages, congressional offices, and so on—had become complacent, preferring to suppress or gloss over disagreement in the interest of preserving their existing arrangements. A wide variety of lazy platitudes, indefensible assumptions, and unacknowledged trade-offs demanded exploration and debate. New questions had emerged that demanded new answers. We believed that, like the boy calling attention to the emperor’s state of undress, a simple willingness to speak clearly about the obvious weaknesses in the unchallenged orthodoxy could have immediate and dramatic effect. An enormous opportunity to construct a compelling new agenda lay untapped. But we needed to apply conservative principles to contemporary problems, rather than page repeatedly through a dog-eared 1980s playbook.
None of us would have dared predict we would come this far this quickly.
In just a few years, our organization has become “a policy nerve center for the party’s younger, more populist generation” (Ezra Klein, New York Times), a “slaughterhouse for Republican sacred cows” (The Economist), “ground zero in a fierce conservative clash over Trump-era economics” (Politico), and “the most influential New Right group on Capitol Hill” (Wall Street Journal). The ideas that we introduced, initially mocked and condemned as “progressive” and “socialist,” have become not only acceptable but, in many cases, the accepted position. Prominent elected leaders and key institutions have become skeptical of corporate power and financial engineering and optimistic about a renewed labor movement; actively hostile to globalization and enthusiastic about industrial policy; averse to entitlement cuts and eager to expand support for working families. The one organization in all of American politics responsible for advancing that set of ideas is American Compass.
How did we accomplish this? We have none of the resources available to the enormous think tanks with scholars dedicated to every issue able to release countless op-eds and talking points and meet with every relevant congressional staffer. Nor do we have armies of lobbyists on our side, whose nonsensical arguments succeed simply because they are in both the speaker’s and listener’s interest to accept. To the contrary, our team has only just become ten people strong; our budget has only just reached $2 million. At the beginning of 2025, we finally moved into real office space from a converted yoga studio above a chiropractor and next door to a liquor store. We are prevailing only because the quality of our ideas and our work is undeniable. We have built a robust foundation for a compelling agenda supported by reams of research, the best writing, and a growing coalition of elected leaders and young policy professionals eager to carry it forward. We are charting an intellectually coherent and politically persuasive course for where American politics, economics, and public policy ought to go. And importantly, for both our popularity and our prospects of success, our heterodox and inclusive approach has attracted supporters and adherents from across the political spectrum.
This volume serves as an anthology documenting how we have revitalized conservative thinking and as a primer on what that new thinking is. The data, quotations, anecdotes, and arguments that the authors draw upon repeatedly in so many different contexts are the ones that have proved most formative for a new generation of policy professionals. The seminal ideas in the essays are the ones that are winning debates on the national political stage, defining the contours of the conservative coalition, and spawning an enormous range of legislative proposals. Have you noticed conservative political leaders sounding strange new notes about Wall Street, labor unions, trade deals, antitrust enforcement, industrial policy, and so many issues where the GOP position had always been so uncomplicated and predictable? Have you wondered, “What are they talking about?” This is what they are talking about.
The volume’s first part, “Principles,” examines the core commitments of conservatism and their implications for the key conceptual debates of modern politics. The first chapter, “The Market,” traces the descent of conservative economic thinking into market fundamentalism and charts a course to a more coherent approach that celebrates and relies upon markets while also recognizing their limits. The second chapter, “The State,” addresses similar questions as they pertain to the role of government. What is public policy good for and when has it traditionally been used? The third and fourth chapters, on “Labor” and “Capital,” define the roles of these countervailing forces and interests in a well-functioning capitalist system and the conditions under which their interaction generates positive outcomes.
Part Two, “Production,” focuses on the errors that have led to deindustrialization of the American economy, the consequences of the imbalances that have ensued, and the types of policy responses needed. Chapter Five, “Globalization,” shows how and why free trade has proved destructive rather than complementary to free markets. Chapter Six, “China,” considers specifically the problems of the U.S.–China relationship and the need for the United States to execute a “hard break” from it. Chapter Seven discusses “Industrial Policy,” a concept that came to be associated with “central planning” in the conservative mind but in fact is a vital economic tool that has been used frequently and to great effect in American history.
Finally, under the heading “People,” the volume’s final part addresses the role that conservative policy must play in sustaining supportive communities and creating the conditions for human flourishing. Chapter Eight, on “Worker Power,” makes the case that a strong labor movement is vital to capitalism and should be a conservative priority. Chapter Nine, on “Education,” interrogates the purpose of public education and argues for much greater emphasis on preparing people to build decent lives as productive contributors to their communities. Chapter Ten, on “Family,” explains the sudden conservative interest in family policy broadly and the creation of a more generous family benefit in particular. The last chapter, on “The Public Purse,” works through the conservative turn against cuts to entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security and the prospects for moving beyond a “starve the beast” strategy of tax cutting that has succeeded only in driving the nation further into debt.
Taken as a whole, this collection of more than thirty essays from more than a dozen scholars and policymakers represents where the cutting-edge of conservative thinking is right now, where the center of gravity in the conservative movement will be in the coming decades, and the only plausible foundation in modern American politics on which to build a durable governing majority.
Oren Cass
Lenox, Massachusetts
January 2025
